Posts by Steven Roper

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Interesting that Safari and Opera have such high error rates while Chrome is so low, considering that all three use the Webkit engine as their foundation (ISTR Opera switched to Webkit a while back didn't they?)

Like others here, I have no problem with the modern incarnations of IE. Since Microsoft have been dragged screaming to the W3C table the job of web development has become a lot less hair-greying than in the days of IE6, when as I recall I became quite the Firefox evangelist on these very forums (and elsewhere) to try and drive standardisation. I'm very thankful that that battle, at least, is finally over!

The only problem with a telescope in Antarctica is that you can only ever see the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps there's a similar location in Greenland where they could put a complementary telescope, then we could cover the entire sky.

@jonathanb

" If an agent of the copyright holder made the files available for download and advertised it on pirate sites, then the people who downloaded them obtained them legally."

You've raised a very interesting legal issue here.

Yes they did download them legally, but it's not the downloading the copyright mafia nail you for - it's the seeding / uploading, which is integral to bittorrent, and which legally amounts to unauthorised distribution. That's what they charge you with on the court documents.

I'd be very interested to see the legal take on this - if I, as a copyright owner, distribute my own work via bittorrent, I'm implicitly authorising others to distribute my work as well by the very act of using the bittorrent mechanism as my distribution medium. So does this implicit consent stand as legal authorisation for anyone in the swarm to distribute? What if I stop seeding the torrent myself - does that withdraw the consent for others to distribute? What if someone else creates another torrent on another tracker and starts seeding it there as well?

Bittorrent seems to be a real Pandora's box as far as legitimate or authorised distribution of copyrighted material is concerned. Any commentards here in the legal profession got a take on this, or does anyone know of any court cases dealing with these issues?

I'll say it, since nobody else has the guts to

It's extremely politically incorrect to say this, and I'll likely cop a pasting as an anti-Semite and a Nazi and all sorts from the more oversensitive and zealous commentards, but -

Zuckerberg is a Jew. Shreateh is a Palestinian. I'd wager heavily that this political condition has at least some measure of effect in the making of Facebook's decision to refuse payment. After all, that money might be used to support anti-Israeli terrorism, no?

Re: Oh, Ambassador!

I remember seeing parody ads for "Crackwhore Barbie" back in the 90s, in MAD magazine or some similar publication I think. I had no idea companies would ever start selling toys that promote criminal activity for real though!

I mean, in an age when kids are expelled for merely hugging each other in school, how the bloody hell is Lego getting away with this without a massive media/do-gooder shitstorm in the offing? It just shows the extent to which the media controls public reactions to these things, doesn't it?

Some toy throwing going on here.

I'm no Google fan any more than I am a Microsoft one, but it seems to me that Microsoft are throwing their toys out of the pram on this one.

As a web developer for many years, I still remember the horror days of IE6 and ActiveX, where I had to create two versions of the same website for every project - one for IE6, and one to the W3C specs. This blew out costs and dev times on every project and I came to loathe Microsoft for this.

But these days Microsoft aren't the big boys on the block any more, and so it seems to me they're now spitting their chips because they're not the ones shoving their bloated inconsistent standards down everyone's throats. Instead they're being forced to abide by the W3C specs as they should have been from day dot. And they're bitching about it because they're no longer the ones calling the shots.

So tough shit MS, your day is past and you have to suck it up and comply with the W3C standards like everyone else.

Mind you, I don't like Google's "We don't have to use HTML 5 but you do" approach either. Anyone who operates under "do as I say not as I do" is someone I never want to deal with, as I despise nothing more than a hypocrite.

Re: A Warning, Please!

Hey Professor.

Before clicking on any link, hover the mouse pointer over it. Then look at the status bar right at the very bottom of your browser window. It'll tell you where the link goes. Make it a habit to do this every time you follow a link.

(Of course the status bar text can be subverted by Javascript, but any site that's likely to do this isn't one I'm likely to allow Javascript for in any case.)

@Ben

Use duckduckgo.com. Not only do they not track you and respect your privacy a lot better than Google, they also do AND based searches by default (you have to use the OR operator if you want OR-based search) And I've found their search results as relevant as anything Google provides.

Re: Crumbs

It's not that big an Achilles heel, and I see this in a different light - the whole event shows that a terrorist attempting to jam the GPS at an airport would be unlikely to succeed. There's nothing "fortunate" about it, evidently the airport authorities were prepared and able to respond to an attack of this kind.

A problem was identified during the test: a jamming signal affecting the guidance systems. The source was triangulated and located, agents dispatched to the location, and the problem was solved in a timely fashion and in good order.

I was impressed to see that there was no overreaction by authorities on this one; no SWAT teams armed to the teeth stomping the guy's face into the pavement, no gung-ho cops tasering innocent bystanders, no besuited operatives ramming gloved hands into body cavities. Just a measured response to the threat and the sensible capitulation of the culprit. It was what could be called a textbook case.

So this doesn't seem to me to be a failure of security. To my mind, it looks like a resounding success.

Encryption alone is not enough

No matter how effectively a message is encrypted, it can be intercepted and saved indefinitely in its encrypted form and then decoded at leisure. And with the computing power available to the three-letter agencies "at leisure" isn't very long at all in the scheme of things.

Better security would be achieved by breaking the encrypted file into pieces and routing each piece separately through a different random path each time, interspersed with rubbish pieces to further obfuscate the real ones. This way, no one system can capture the entire message and piece it back together. The internet is already set up to operate on this basic principle; all that's needed is software to ensure that no two packets go by the same route.

The weak point in this system would of course be the sender's and receiver's ISPs; of necessity, both ISPs would have every piece pass through them. A possible workaround would be an open network of interconnected wireless routers, linked between neighbouring homes and offices. This way, part of my message could go through my ISP, part through my neighbour's ISP, part through the guy down the road's ISP. The recipient could receive the message the same way. This way, even if all of us were on the same ISP (as in some areas where one big company has a monopoly), the ISP sees packets from multiple customers and has no way to tie any group of packets back together into a single file.

At present, this is conjecture, as in my area people aren't yet amenable to interconnecting their wireless routers, but I've heard of districts where this is being done already, and as governments and companies continue to encroach on our freedoms, I'm sure people will in time come to see the necessity of doing this.

Re: Interesting

"And what kind of free democratic nation would do that ?"

I don't think that word means what you think it means. As I understand it, "Democratic" - as in "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea" or "The German Democratic Republic" - means something like "a nation governed in such a way is to give its citizenry the illusion that they have a say in how the country is run." You seem to have misunderstood the "the illusion that they have" part in that definition. Also, "free" is the standard word used by dictators from Napoleon to Obama to describe the conditions in the countries they preside over.

So, in actual fact, pretty much every "free democratic " nation would indeed do what you say, in keeping with what they really are...

@ heyrick

Exactly what I noticed.

I actually laughed at the inherent self-contradiction when I read: "...the collected data was "anonymised" before it was analysed, hoped to use this technology to... show tailored adverts to people as they walked by the bins." The "anonymised" part is the most sickeningly obvious attempt at damage control spin I have ever read; in the very same breath they reveal the lie and their true intentions.

By definition, if they're showing me "tailored" advertising, they must know who they are showing the adverts to, ergo I am not anonymous. Whether or not they know the name on my birth certificate is irrelevant; to tailor advertising means they must know my comings and goings, likes and dislikes, lifestyle choices, associations, occupation, hobbies, interests - in short, everything that makes me who I am. What price a name if you have all that? Anonymised my fucking arse.

@OrsonX Re: face-recognition software banned being a shame

The use of face-recognition software in public places bloody well should be banned, so if it has been that's a ban I fully support.

Suppose you're walking down the street and your Glass films me at a politically incorrect rally, or walking into an adult bookshop, for example. The face-recognition software identifies me, even if I'm not known to you, and sends the info back to Google/Facebook for processing. My mother has already posted dozens of pictures of me on Facebook without my consent so Facebook already has a face-recognition profile on me, like it or not. Next, Google/Facebook notifies everyone on my contact list that I'm where you saw me, or at the very least notes it down in some database for later use when I need a security clearance or police check done.

That's the kind of shit face-recognition software is capable of, whether or not it yet does it. It's the most invasive technological violation of personal liberty yet created. Without it, cameras are just image recorders, that require a human to take the time to look at the images to determine if I was anywhere in particular. That degree of labour introduces reasonable odds that someone inimical to me can't easily identify me or be able to track my movements.

But with it, every net-connected camera becomes an automated remote identification device, constantly updating any relevant database with a running update on all my actions and movements, the result of which I have to live in the constant awareness of my every movement being tracked by people who don't necessarily have my well-being at heart.

if it sounds like I'm being paranoid, I have every right to be. The "liberal" supporters of political correctness are known for viciously demanding the ruination of anyone who doesn't kowtow to their PC worldview: the purveyors of "tolerance" are hypocritically the most sanctimoniously intolerant bigots this side of the Taliban. And I'm an active supporter of Men's Rights Australia, A Voice For Men, and the Campaign Against Political Correctness, amongst others. I've had hate mail and death threats from these same "pro-tolerance" PC bigots for publicly supporting these organisations. It's noteworthy that while the media is screaming about "trolls" and cops are arresting those who threaten and abuse high-profile feminists, nobody's doing anything about the harassment and abuse dished out by their supporters to anyone who dares to contradict them. The number of downvotes I'll probably cop for this paragraph alone will illustrate the principle quite adequately, I believe.

Is it any wonder, in the face of the hysterical PC self-righteousness that pervades society these days, that its accompaniment by such invasive technology poses such a danger?

No, bloody right face-recognition software should be banned. I wish they'd ban it here in Australia too.

I have a complex up/down voting system for this site!

On consideration, I find I have quite a complex algorithm for upvoting and downvoting on El Reg, more so than other sites, due to El Reg's voting system requiring a wait for two page reloads to vote. As a result, I only go to the trouble if I feel the post is worth voting on.

2) The post expresses a political opinion I strongly agree with (regardless of its factual content or literary coherency - the political alignment with my own is sufficient cause for an upvote.)

3) The post has good literary merit or posits its owner's case with aplomb.

4) amanfromMars posted it and I cannot decipher or understand what he posted, or if I simply give up trying part way through.

I'll downvote a post if:

1) The post has even the slightest whiff of political correctness about it.*

2) The spelling, grammar and/or syntax is so bad as to make the post indecipherable (amanfromMars is treated oppositely here: he gets a downvote if his post is actually decipherable!)

3) The argument of the post is so ill-researched, fallacious or delusional as to expose the poster as a retarded fuckwit.

Fanboi/fandroid arguments get nothing. I hate Apple myself, because of their control-freakery and egregious litigiousness, but I won't upvote a post simply because it's an Apple hater and I won't downvote one simply because it supports them. My fanboy loyalty to IT companies died with the Commodore Amiga.

*Political correctness: I won't downvote a post simply because it expresses a political opinion I disagree with. For example, you could call for abolition of minimum wage or billion-year copyright extensions and I wouldn't downvote you for that even though I disagree with it. But any hint of the poster supporting feminism (note: by this I mean focus on women's rights alone), affirmative action, advocacy of censorship of dissenting views, or anti-white/anti-male dogma WILL get a downvote, guaranteed, regardless of the validity of the argument or how well the post might be written.

If I feel the politically-correct post is aggravating enough and it pisses me off sufficiently, I'll actually go to the trouble of going to the poster's public post history page and sequentially downvoting their other posts until my temper calms down (David W, Vladimir Plouzhnikov, Oolons and NomNomNom have all been victims of this at various times!) I know that's juvenile, and one should expect more from a 46 year old adult, but I find it therapeutic and it makes me feel better... So to the guys listed above: If you suddenly find your last 50-odd posts all have at least one downvote regardless of topic, you can feel gratified that you've pissed me off enough to waste half an hour attacking your post history!

"2. This person is overpaid and the price you are being offered is vastly inflated. (reality)."

This is why, in our office, a guy who shows up driving an 8 year old Ford Falcon and wearing a turtleneck sweater and jeans, has a lot better chance of selling us a few boxes of photocopier toner than, say, a guy who shows up in a new F-type Jaguar wearing an Armani suit. Given that attire in our office veers decidedly towards the neat casual side, upstaging one's potential customers with flashy overpriced bling that is obviously going to be tacked onto the sale price isn't a good start!

There's an old Murphy's Law corollary that goes something like "The plushness of the front office decor is inversely proportional to the fundamental solvency of the firm." The same principle applies to travelling sales reps as well.

@ Jim 59

Just because laws between the USA and USSR may differ, doesn't mean the principles - or abilities - do. For example, you argue:

"People could not even leave the USSR on holiday, whereas every American citizen is free to travel the world."

IF they can afford it. Given the wealth distribution curve in the USA, I'd say, at guess, that at least 60% of the population can't afford to leave their home town, let alone travel to another country. So while the laws may imply freedom, the actual outcome, for the majority, is still the same.

"The supreme soviet was unelected, whereas the US citizens have full suffrage."

But giving people the choice between Democrats and Republicans, given that for the average American life stays pretty much the same regardless of who is in power - that is, subject to random search and seizure, indefinite detention without trial, no due process (don't tell me that the Obama Administration has given Snowden anything remotely approaching due process) - so again, the effect is much the same whether there was only one party or two. Western democracy has become a token gesture at best.

"The USA has to keep people out, not shoot people trying to escape like the USSR."

That one I'll give you - considering that you have an overcrowded, poverty-stricken third-world country ruled by brutal drug lords on your southern border. Anything's better than that. But that's the majority of people you have to "keep out"; I don't see too many other westerners trying to set up in America.

"Snowden is being pursued by a democratically elected government that wants to bring criminal charges and give him an open trial."

Ha! Well, for democratically elected government I refer you to my above answer on that subject. The Obama Administration has openly branded him a traitor. No trial, no due process, no "alleged", they've just come straight out and announced on the international stage that he's guilty. There's no chance he'll ever receive a fair trial now. If you believe for one second that if Snowden were to return to the USA he'd be found anything other than guilty on the spot, I'd be interested in selling you the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

To finish, I'd like to quote some excerpts from a letter sent from Snowden's father's lawyer to the Obama Administration:

"We are also appalled at your administration’s scorn for due process, the rule of law, fairness, and the presumption of innocence as regards Edward... Your decision to force down a civilian airliner carrying Bolivian President Eva Morales in hopes of kidnapping Edward also does not inspire confidence that you are committed to providing him a fair trial... Yet Speaker Boehner has denounced Edward as a "traitor"... Ms. Bachmann has pronounced that, "This was not the act of a patriot; this was an act of a traitor." And Ms. Feinstein has decreed that Edward was guilty of "treason,"..."

Yes, a fair and just trial under a democratic government indeed. You can read the letter in its entirety here.

I find it amusingly ironic

30 years ago, we welcomed defectors fleeing Soviet tyranny, persecuted for revealing the truth about their despotic regime, and cheered them on as they made their life-or-death dash across the Iron Curtain, desperately seeking freedom from an unjust and totalitarian state ruled by a dictator.

Now, in these margin times, a defector is fleeing American tyranny, persecuted for revealing the truth about his despotic regime, and we cheer him on as he makes his life-or-death dash across the Electronic Curtain, desperately seeking freedom from an unjust and totalitarian state ruled by a dictator!

Duck test = fish test!

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck."

This line of reasoning could also be used to define a whale as a fish, since a whale looks and swims in similar fashion - as famously (and erroneously) argued by Herman Melville via his protagonist Ishmael in Moby Dick:

"Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost anyone must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter XXXII Cetology.

Obviously this reasoning is flawed, as any primary school kid knows that a whale is a mammal, not a fish. So in similar vein, just because something looks, swims and quacks like a duck, doesn't necessarily mean that it is. It may well be that it usually is, and one could be justified for saying so, but using this argument as the basis for a legal decision doesn't bode well for rule of logic and reason. There needs to be a more solid factual basis for arguing that Bitcoin is indeed the same thing as money.

At present, Bitcoin strikes me as having more in common with a commodity than a currency. Consider trade commodities, for example sugar or copper. Like sugar and copper, Bitcoins have a variable market price which rises and falls according to supply and demand. Like sugar and copper, Bitcoins are manufactured by a value-adding process of labour and production. Like sugar and copper, Bitcoins are bought and sold on commodity exchanges, not banks.

So under this court's ruling, sugar and copper are the same thing as money, just as Bitcoins are. They can be used to store and retrieve value, bought and sold for profit, just as Bitcoins are. But if we start treating commodities as though they were money, we're opening a Pandora's box of trade nightmares that are going to have repercussions around the world. I'll leave it to the more imaginative commodities traders to consider the ramifications of that decision!

I can answer your question, NomNomNom.

The reason your ISP will do nothing about your complaints about trolls, and the reason why you will inevitably receive similar ignorance from your MP, is quite simple, although you are clearly too blinded by political correctness to see it.

That is, because the endless assault on men and men's rights that feminist "men" like yourself have perpetrated in your self-hating ideological zeal, have cast women unjustly as victims, men as aggressors, and created an anti-male mentality throughout society. You don't need help because you're male. You're privileged. We should only be helping women and other "underprivileged" minorities, remember? Wasn't that your agenda?

There's no political mileage in assisting you because you are male, one of the "patriarchy", a "potential rapist". The very same social climate, with its myth of male privilege that you have helped to create is now therefore your undoing, in what I can only regard as a beautiful example of poetic justice.

Re: Creation less than 10,000 ya

Of course he did.

Every faithful believer knows there's no mileage in preaching to the choir. You must go out and spread the Good News amongst the sinners! And what better place to shine the Light of the Lord than the benighted cesspit of atheist heathen unbelieving science geeks comprising the commentard community of El Reg?

Re: LoL

Actually, given the power the PC lobby now wields in the media and Western government institutions, it's more likely the first person on Mars will be an African-American transgendered gay/lesbian feminist. Can't let those evil oppressive white male hetero cis scum have all the glory now can we?

Re: From Edinburgh

Are these guys still at it? At least the've moved on from poems to jokes over the last 30 years.

I clearly remember when this same university, way back in the early 80s, produced a "sonnets" program designed to compose poetry via contextual AI rather than just randomly stringing words together (like the poems program did on my VIC-20). Although I recall that it failed rather spectacularly, I remember this event because of one rather sinister sonnet the Edinburgh program churned out at the time, that has stuck with me ever since:

For now the time draws near, that you shall fall

And so it is within my depths conceal'd,

This store keeps yet the greatest truth of all,

And to men shall it never be reveal'd.

So consider, take heed of what I say,

This day you rule, tomorrow I hold sway.

Knowing this was written by a computer spooked me back then, and looking back on it now it seems that our friends at Edinburgh presaged the RotM by a few decades!

So what difference does https make?

Facebook are still going to hand over your details to governments and LEAs alike. If some feminazi on Facebook decides to step up the War on Men another notch, and I organise some opposition or argue back at her, I'd still be arrested for political incorrectness hate speech regardless. So Facebook doing this proves what exactly?

Hmmm

Sounds to me like there's another civil liberty that needs to be removed or another tax imposed, one whose removal/imposition can't be justified by protecting children or preventing terrorism, so the old 'anthropogenic climate change' excuse is as good as any I suppose.

"Superfast" brings back a memory

As I recall from my dim and heady childhood way back in the 70s, "Superfast" was a line of Matchbox cars (the real solid metal ones - remember those?) of which I had several examples in my toybox. I also had the associated plastic track with the loop-the-loops and the "Superbooster" car-flinger that propelled the Matchbox cars around it. I'm still annoyed to this day that my mother ended up giving it all to the church when I grew up and stopped playing with it. The collection would probably be worth thousands today.

Popup blockers

This is probably not a popup in the traditional sense (as in a new discrete browser window), but a HTML floating div inserted dynamically over the page content. I've noticed a lot of sites doing this recently, presumably in response to the increasing numbers of people using popup blockers. Of course, disabling Javascript can reduce the incidence of this, but an increasing number of sites are circumventing this by simply not displaying anything at all without it.

@Pet Peeve

Make VPNs legal?

Insofar as this is not quite yet the People's Democratic Republic of Australia (although admittedly it's well along the way), there is no law as yet forbidding the use of a VPN in this country. Although the way things are going there may soon be, albeit more likely as I've predicted elsewhere, some kind of business-use-only licencing system will probably appear requiring you to register and prove a requirement to use one in the normal course of business. Not just for copyright enforcement, but also in response to the reaction against PRISM and its ilk. After all, if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear, right?

Re: The Girl on the power driven lid..

"Miniskirted operator...mid 70s"

Mate, if you haven't seen a miniskirt since the mid-70s, may I suggest you move to warmer climes. Here in sunny Adelaide the miniskirt seems to be a perennial summer fashion; hot weather trumps feminist prudery every time. One only needs to hike down Rundle Mall of a hot summer Saturday morning to cop an eyeful worthy of Buck Rogers himself!

@ Oblivion62 and jonathanb

I wouldn't know how it was done on the system described, but on the Commodore 64 (the machine of my misguided yoof) redirecting the output of a for-next loop to the printer would have been accomplished by:

10 OPEN 4,4 : CMD 4

20 FOR X = 1 TO 1000000 : PRINT X : NEXT X

30 CLOSE 4

Damn me, why am I wasting brain cells remembering how to write in CBM BASIC after more than 25 years?

Re: Building our own

Already done.

Google "RepRap" and drool. A completely open-source, patent-free, self-replicating 3D printer (all you need to get hold of elsewhere are the electronics) which is proving to be extremely popular and has become the default standard for 3D printing.

Once you have one, it's trivial to use it to make more for all your friends. It's a self-replicating replicator (or the first step towards one anyway!)

And of course, we Aussies are to be denied pretty much all of the fireworks, since the damn thing is set to pass directly over the North Pole. I mean, what part of "ecliptic plane" do these buggers not understand?!?

With regard to WD vs. Seagate, I have over the last 10 or so years been privy to a singular phenomenon between a friend and myself. Now I am a WD man, have been for ages, while my friend swears by Seagate. And we both have good reasons for being the way we are.

Every single Seagate drive I have bought, since 2005, has gone bad within six months of purchase. It's not a batch issue either; the last one was in 2010, and it started showing sector errors within 3 months. Yet I've never lost a WD drive; the only reason they get replaced is because I need a bigger drive and only have so many drive bays on my system. - so I have close to a dozen still-working WD drives in my spares box.

For my friend, the opposite is true. Every time he's bought a WD drive, he's had to replace it within the year. For him, that last one was last year. Yet he's never had to replace a Seagate drive, except, as with myself, when he's needed more storage space.

It's not a "you must have gotten one from a bad batch" issue, because the phenomenon has been manifesting for nearly a decade for both of us, involving drives from multiple sources and vendors, both internal and external, over many years. Maybe it's just an extremely improbable coincidence. Maybe there's some self-perpetuating psychic drive-busting phenomenon at work. Possibly it's even confirmation bias (have I ever mistaken a Seagate for a WD or vice versa?)

All I know is, I'm damn sure that every Seagate I've bought has gone bad while every WD has lasted its term, while for my friend the opposite is true. We both relate our experiences whenever it comes up, as a demonstration of the folly of brand loyalty and living proof of YMMV!

So that'll be another bunch of students grinding their pieces of paper then

When I see the words "[Name] University" and "crystal storage technology" in the opening parts of a story I know that graduation time is on the way once again. The tropes are so obvious they've become cliched:

1) It uses crystalline holographic-type technology;

2) It uses LAZERZ!!!

3) It offers orders of magnitude more storage space than we have now;

4) It's orders of magnitude faster;

5) It's orders of magnitude longer-lasting.

Oh please. I wish they'd come up with something new to tease us with; watching the same Star Trek: University episodes year after year is getting a little hackneyed now.

Ok, on to what this is really about: the Class of 2013 needs a subject for their theses so they can get their degrees. So they come up with yet another fantasy sci-fi holographic crystal storage device that promises the moon, like the ones covered by El Reg every year since day dot, and which will, once the pieces of paper have been handed out and the caps tossed in the air, be stuffed into an archive box and buried in the University's basement along with all the other pie-in-the-sky technologies we keep hearing about but never materialise.

And once said students have their pieces of paper, they no doubt will all head off to their cushy jobs flipping burgers while a few lucky ones will become government IT consultants and the like. Meanwhile, we will continue using the same spinning rusty discs and CMOS chip based storage technology we've been using since the 70s, because none of these classroom fantasies ever see the light of day once graduation is over.

Yawn. Call me when it gets out of the classroom and onto a factory floor, please.

@Ledswinger

Pale Blue Dot

Another fantastic image from Cassini, putting our tiny world into perspective. Once again, I am reminded of the the words of the great Carl Sagan, and his "pale blue dot" speech which never fails to choke me up and bring tears to my eyes, every time I hear it.

For me, the moment of clarity is when I hear the one sentence from that speech which is the crux of the whole thing: "There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

One only needs to look at the butchery of the coastline around Cape Jervis (35°34'03" S 138°08'02" E) and the hills near Snowtown (33°46'23" S 138°08'11" E) to appreciate what eyesores these windfarms are. Putting solar panels out in the desert where they're in nobody's way and do a far better job of generating power, is a much better way of generating sustainable energy.